You won’t be able to describe Penelope Trunk’s career advice as traditional.

For instance, during her luncheon address Monday at the PRSA 2008 International Conference: The Point of Connection, in Detroit, Trunk said that job hopping and regular sex are two of the keys to career satisfaction.

Trunk, author of “Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success,” popular blogger and syndicated columnist for The Boston Globe, has a freewheeling, almost stream-of-conscious presentation delivery. If she worked from a prepared speech, the text wouldn’t contain any punctuation.

With the sass of a stand-up comedian and an unorthodox approach to a timeless subject, Trunk began by quickly describing her unusual career trajectory, including her start as a professional beach volleyball player. Later, she spent nearly 10 years as a marketing executive in the software industry. She also founded three companies of her own, enduring an IPO, merger and bankruptcy along the way.

Her current take on career opportunities may be seen as counterintuitive, though that kind of perspective is how she has amassed a following in recent years.

“Many people think that you have a lot of choices and the ability to manage your career if it’s a good economy. But when it’s a bad economy, you have to suffer through crap jobs. This is true for people who are in crap industries. Like if your hedge fund went under, then you’ll have to suffer through a crappy job,” she said, “But I truly believe that this is the golden age of public relations. You have so much more control over your careers right now than other people do.”

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Career columnist Penelope Trunk was the guest speaker for the Monday luncheon during the 2008 PRSA International Conference in Detroit. Before her speech, she talked with Tactics and The Strategist Online.

JE: Given the scary headlines in newspapers and online, one might think there’s a 100 percent unemployment rate in the United States. What’s your take on the job market these days?

PT: In general, there are isolated job losses. Because the media and investment bankers are married to each other, it’s totally overblown. What’s happening on Wall Street is an exaggerated reflection of what’s happening in the world because all of the media come out of New York. There are pockets of the world that are doing really well. Biotech, for instance.

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For GM executive Bob Lutz, Detroit is the perfect setting for a conference of PR professionals.

“Detroit and the U.S. domestic automobile industry need to change a lot of perceptions — often misguided and wrong perceptions — that the rest of the country has about us if we’re going to turns things around,” Lutz, vice chairman of global product development for GM, said yesterday morning during the General Session at the PRSA 2008 International Conference.

And given the recessive global economy, Lutz acknowledged that it’s even more challenging to get your message across and make yourself heard.

Lutz, a veteran of more than 40 years in the automobile industry and chief blogger for GM’s Fastlane blog, shared his thoughts on the art of communications with the 3,000 students and professionals in attendance. His five key points echoed the theme of this year’s Conference — the Point of Connection.

1. Communications is about making a connection.

That connection — message sent and received — is the essence of communications. “Your message must be received, heard and understood,” he said. “Otherwise, no connection is made.”

Lutz compared making a connection to the concept of automobile design. “An automobile’s design must make an immediate, emotional connection to a potential buyer,” he said. “If there is no connection — if that automobile visually doesn’t fascinate — then the potential customer has no desire to learn more about it…there will be no sale.”

So how do you make a message connect? He discussed that in his second point.

    2.  Communications must say something.

Lutz said that he dislikes canned, sanitized corporate messaging that doesn’t say anything.

“All large corporations are good at it. General Motors is no exception. Instead of being a weapon for putting out the truth, [a press release] becomes a method of risk avoidance,” he said. “It focuses on making sure no one says the wrong thing. By focusing on not saying the wrong thing, you’re essentially saying nothing.”

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Before his General Session on Sunday, Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, who now serves as a customer-service representative for the site, spoke for a few minutes with Tactics and The Strategist Online. Here’s a quick excerpt of that conversation:

On going cold turkey from social media for a 24-hour period:
Oh, there’s no way I could go offline that long. (Mike Smith, CEO of MSBD, Newmark’s public affairs counsel, laughed and interjected, “he couldn’t go 25 minutes!”) There’s no way I could stay offline for longer than the time of a flight. My job is customer service right now. I’m looking forward to Internet access being on planes. My life will be easier that way. I won’t have a big backlog of e-mails waiting for me. I do work every day. I stay connected as much as reasonable. And that works for me.

On the appeal of Twitter and microblogging:
It’s an intimate form of communications. It’s real time to a lot of people. It forces you to be brief. And I believe pretty strongly that brevity is the soul of wit. You can just be talking about whatever you feel like. I’m fond of bad bird haiku.

Continue reading " How Long Could Craig Newmark Go Offline? (Hint: Not very) "

Internet vanguard Craig Newmark is the General Session speaker this afternoon. For a little more on Newmark, the founder of craigslist, check out the interview he did with Tactics and The Strategist Online this past September. Among other things, he discussed the wonders of Twitter and the next big thing in Web 2.0.

Also: PRSA, in partnership with Thomson Reuters, will offer the webcast of Craig Newmark’s keynote address, at no cost, to the public. The webcast will begin at approximately 12:45 p.m. on Oct. 26, The interactive session will be hosted by Paula Tutman, an Emmy Award-winning news reporter at NBC affiliate WDIV in Detroit. Click here to register (*for those unable to view the presentation live, it will be available as playback for three months following the conference).

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